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From: "And Rosta" <a.rosta@lycos.co.uk>
To: <lojban-list@lojban.org>
Subject: [lojban] Re: tu'o du'u (was Re: xoi'a)
Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 02:17:39 +0100
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Jordan:
> On Wed, Oct 02, 2002 at 01:58:55AM +0100, And Rosta wrote:
> [...]
> > (I do wish {tu'o du'u} could be reduced to one syllable. It'd be the
> > ultimate Zipfean saving. Are there any monosyllables still going
> > spare?)
> 
> Errr; doesn't it need to be said a lot to justify that?  No offense
> intended, but I've never seen anyone say it except you (I think it
> was the wiki page for poi'i).  I'm not even sure what an unspecified
> number of du'us means that is different from the assumed default of
> su'opa if you were to say "lo du'u", "le du'u", or "lo'e du'u".

Other jboskepre have used "tu'o du'u", but the abbreviation could
equally well be short for "lo'e du'u".

If I'd been designing Lojban syntax I'd allow a selbri to function
as a sumti ("mi djuno lo'e du'u do klama" => "djuno mi klama do"),
but given the constraints of Lojban grammar it would be nice to
be able to reduce it to "mi djuno XOI do klama", where XOI is short
for lo'e du'u.

{le du'u} is used a lot by everybody (though {le} is not really
appropriate there), and many uses of {le nu} should have {du'u}
instead (though maybe usage is improving in this regard?).

--And.